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In a setting where the spirits of the dead can be brought back and talked to, they're essentially read-only memories of the person up to their death rather than the character brought back. So while they can react to new information they learn while called up, they can't gain any new memories as they're erased as soon as they're dismissed.
e.g. Alice was ten when her grandmother died. Now that she's twenty, whenever she calls on her grandmother's soul for guidance she has to go through the whole "how you've grown" routine even if she calls her several times in the same day.
Similarly, whenever Bob calls up a shaman's ghost for help on a spirit quest, he has to recap who he is, what the quest is for, and what steps he's already carried out so the shaman won't start from the beginning, even though Bob's been on the quest for years now.